Part III: Chronicling My Return to Catholicism
Pies de Cristo Crucificado; Photo credit: Policraticus (@catholicpic) https://www.pinterest.com/pin/faith--513199320041773078/
October of my sophomore year, I was in driver’s training. It was 5PM-6PM each afternoon, for like a month or something. This meant, as soon as I got home from Notre Dame Catholic High, I changed, grabbed a snack and my notebook, and then walked just over an hour to the nearest Detroit public high school, where the course was offered. Everyone knew not to take their bike, because if you did, it was going to be stolen.
One evening, near the halfway mark between Denby High and home, my parents pulled up in the car to get me. It wasn’t to go home, but rather to drag me to midweek services at the new church they had become part of. That night, or any, it was the last place I wanted to be.
As long as my sister and I were under their roof, we were going to church when our parents did, unless there was a pressing excuse not to. My sister had one, because by then she was in college, and like most students, working part time. So late classes or the job had earned her a pass for that night.
However, despite my protestations, my evening was going to be spent in that youth group.
________
On the brink of sixteen, a deeply developing anger had started to burn within me. The seed for it, thinking back, was the whole process of religious upheaval, and its accompanying confusion and loss (described in the prior installment of this spiritual autobiography).
Here, it is important to note (again): I have made clear my parents were complicit in that process. Still, I understand more clearly and more preciously than ever, God was as well.
My folks were fully transformed people, and without question in my mind, both were doing what they thought was right. Being how I managed to turn out OK, their unceasing love, support, and wisdom proves to me that they indeed were doing what was right.
I can see it now. And I appreciate it now.
Nevertheless, as established in the last installment, it served as an incredibly complicated thing in my life at a pretty unique period of it (adolescence into teens years). I want to make certain that I do not come across as though I fault them in any of this. Rather, I thank them for all of it.
I just didn’t “get” it at the time. In fact, I was growing to resent what they were doing, and that I had to follow suit.
________
I sat in the back of the church, resenting having to be in youth group that night too.
As was frequently the case, I sat alone. I didn’t want to be a part of that group. I was still freshly chafed from the catastrophe of the prior evangelical church and longed to just go back to being Catholic again. I wasn’t prepared to just leap right in and trust this place or these people or whatever their brand of Christianity was all about.
Although, even back then, I would have admitted (probably begrudgingly) this church was a different sort of place … and in a very good way. To whatever extent my soon-to-be sixteen-year-old self could discern anything, I could discern that much.
At this point we had been going there probably close to six months.
I vividly recall that night too. What I mostly recall was the “new guy.” He was a few years older, and he seemed like he was already at home, despite me never seeing him prior. That irritated me tremendously. But when he sat at the drum set and began tapping out the intro to RUSH’s song YYZ on the cymbals, that made me want to punch him the throat.
Fifteen years later, he was the best man at my wedding. And one day, when I’m on my death bed, I have no doubt I will remember him as the dearest friend of my life, as I cannot imagine ever having one better.
Growing to Love these People
The point of such a lead in serves two purposes: (1) It sort of sets the stage for where I was at that point in life with all of this church/religion stuff; and (2) it serves as microcosm for my broader relationship with this church community over the years that would follow.
As for that stage, well … it was turning into something rather bleak. I found myself, throughout my high school and college years, growing more and more spiritually estranged from God, as my confusion spiraled deeper.
From a spiritual environment that was historically established, reverently ordered, and meeting in a breathtaking building specifically constructed for drawing attention to God, I had been transplanted into an environment that was seemingly some ad hoc, seat of the pants, impulsive and transient religious free-for-all, meeting in a rented kindergarten room.
I loved the former and loathed the latter. And when the latter crashed and burned, I felt a deep justification for my feelings, asking my parents, “Can we go back to being Catholic now?”
The cognitive dissonance just broadened through my senior year. On one hand, I was still immersed in the Catholic world, still going to their school, still going to (but not allowed to participate in) the Mass. On the other, I was going to another church … and despite it being a well-established denomination with structural polity (Assembly of God), it was a place and people I was not going to allow myself to connect with. At least that was my intention.
I would learn to go through the motions, but they couldn’t make me give my mind, heart, and/or spirit over to it. And they certainly couldn’t make me yield my trust.
So, I lived like an outsider in each world. In one of those, it was because I was not allowed to assimilate. In the other, it was because I would not allow myself to assimilate.
Into my junior year, not having the mental or emotional development to process this all, I fashioned walls—walls that were a mixed construction of bitterness and skepticism. By my mid-twenties, they were a well-engineered fortress. A shelter in which I protected a confused and spiritually lonely self.
There are people who will read this, who knew me back then, and if they’re being honest will confirm what an expert asshole I could be. I had a finely honed and fiercely directed brand of sarcasm that was especially designed for cutting down, or keeping at bay, Christian kids around me.
It was also acutely tuned toward paternal defiance.
But why? What was the need for that? I was hurting, but what was that hurt rooted in?
It was grounded in the deeply painful awareness that over the years, my sense of God was waning. And while I have for years looked back in wonder over why I was so adversarial toward my father, in my mid-teens to early twenties, I have come to recognize that I held it all against him. Even if not cognizant of it until far later.
As his faith grew and his life was continually, before my eyes, being molded more and more to a godly character … mine was eroding like a sandy shoreline.
How crazy is that, right?
A kid who’d been in church their entire life, who stared for hours at the pictures in his Children’s Bible, and who’d once lived in awe of God … getting to the point where he found himself in a slowly darkening cave, holding a torch with a steadily dying flame. By twenty, I was fighting desperately inside to maintain just a flicker of my faith.
Even as I prepare this piece, I am reconnected with the deep heart break of that man, who knew with conviction he once had a relationship with the Creator of all things, remembering how I pled with that God to not let me fall to the inevitability I saw unfolding.
Forget about faith. Forget about a relationship. I was clawing down to the bone just to admit to myself that I still believed in God.
And for God’s part, he seemed to be OK with that.
Ryp and Vicki
So why lash out at Christians around me? That’s the strange part of this. Just like that young guy, tapping out RUSH on the cymbals became my dearest friend … this church I wanted nothing to do with, became the dearest community I’ve ever been a part of.
It began with the relentlessly loving inclusion of a young couple who began serving as the new youth pastors there.
Every time I showed up, they drew me in and simply invited me to join in.
And when I was particularly standoffish, they would sense it and just sit with me, content with not forcing things. There was never any pretense about it, they were simply about me … never pressure, always patience … always a very genuine sense of acceptance.
They were pillars in my life when I needed something to cling firm to. And despite time, distance, and decades of removal from my life, those pillars remain foundational to who I am still becoming. I will forever love, admire, and be grateful to them.
I remember when he found out I was a baseball player, he saw to it that joining the softball team became my path into social bonding. When I turned out to be a really good addition to a REALLY good squad, camaraderie naturally followed. Nothing like being part of a special team.
But the ball diamond was just a gateway. A basketball league followed. I found a fit playing guitar in various settings. I was asked to coach the women’s softball team, who also won a few championships. Ryp and Vicki had moved on, but the next thing I knew, a decade later, is that I was integrally involved in community with those people.
And despite the intention not to, I had grown to love them.
The Imposter
But there was an internal need to keep this all in-check. So, the lashing out was an instrument of proximity, inasmuch as I feared getting/being too close.
One reason for my hesitation was my suspicion they were full of crap. The skepticism that has always been a part of my DNA was still on high alert. These folks couldn’t be as safe as they seemed, and I wasn’t going to fall for any Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Baker stuff.
The second reason was because I was afraid they’d realize I was full of crap. Here they had become my tribe … my social circle … my friends … my family …
But the fiber connecting them all (their spiritual identity) was something I knew I did not share.
When life shifted from being a student to being a professional, there was some drift from the church community. My world began to broaden substantially, and new peer groups began to surface … new relationships blossomed … change was abundant.
Some connection with the church was maintained, however, because those relationships were so valuable. But the gravity of career demands, shift work, and new social circles, was a natural byproduct of finally entering real adulthood.
In that space, I found myself living more like a person who was otherwise non-churched and religion-free. A spiritual life was so distant to me at that point, I was able to comfortably live without one. I came to regard spirituality with little thought at all.
I went to church less and less, but just enough to justify a spot on the softball team, be that playing or coaching, and to keep a line open to the meaningful relationships there.
I was twenty-six when I returned to the Catholic mass, for the first time since graduating high school. It was for a wedding ceremony. I was strangely excited for it, as if there was a chance reconnecting with God awaited me there. It wasn’t to be, however.
So, as I drove to the reception, a sadness settled over me. Just enough for a single tear to slide from my eye. It was at that moment I realized the flame was not only out, but the wick it once sat upon had completely cooled.
Behind that tear, nevertheless, followed a sense of relief with that realization. Relief that I had finally settled within my own self that as far as that flame went, God was dead to me, and in me.
Just like that, all the confusion and sense of being the outsider evaporated. Just like that, I had gotten to a point where the prior fifteen years of confusion and loss and hurt around “Christianity” got neatly packaged in a little box I was finally able to kick to the curb and move on from. In the moment, I was free of it all.
“Whoa! Wait!” With the sound of a needle dragging over vinyl, my thoughts called to mind the woman I had been dating for the last year, or so. “How do I kick my neat little box to the curb without losing her?”
How would I tell my mother, father, extended family? How would I tell my best friend? My roommate?
What about the lead pastors? Jeff and Karen? Talk about pillars ... they are the bedrock pillars get erected upon. Another couple who I’d come to madly admire and love ... with them remaining profoundly impacting on my life for the better part of it.
How could I face any of these dear people with that sort of news, when I valued each of them (and many more) so deeply?
These individuals remain among the finest relationships I’ve experienced, and confronting the risk of losing any of them, because I no longer bought the whole “God thing,” was quite a tricky proposal.
And of course, each of them was close enough that I couldn’t just start living “God-free” without telling them.
God aside, I had ties to the church I simply did not want to jeopardize. Counting the cost of losing, or even substantially damaging, these vital relationships was completely unpalatable. (This theme will resurface too).
Well … good old-fashioned duplicity seemed the best way to proceed. So, I played “Christian” for the sake of those connections. I carried on as an imposter.
Trust I am not proud of it.
This went on for about a year and half, until the first of the two most significant events of my life.
Resolving to Come Clean
I was sitting on an aluminum bench, looking out over a baseball diamond in the park behind our hotel. It was a warm Florida night. I suppose it was close to midnight. It was extremely dark and very calm.
I was down there for the week with a small group of guys. Not for Spring break or anything, but to visit a church—a church where there was supposedly some “move of God” occurring.
That was at least what some friends had reported to me, after they attended this “revival” a few months prior.
One of these was my best friend— Jim, the drummer.
Revival Service, Inside Brownsville Assembly of God; Pensacola , FL. Photo credit: https://askdrbrown.org/library/i-saw-brownsville-revival
What is interesting about this was my awareness of him not being the sort of guy prone to exaggeration or emotionalism. So, hearing his reports of the things he saw and experienced personally, had me somewhat curious. Curious enough to accept the invitation to join him and some others on their return trip.
Who knows, maybe I’d find God again. I suspect that was Jim’s hope and prayer.
At the very least, it was an escape from Michigan in late March.
So, what brought me to that bench, along the third base line of a dark baseball field, in the middle of the night?
It was mostly disgust, I suppose.
There were thousands of people from across the country who came to participate in this “move of God.” That meant, in order to get into the evening “revival services” you had to camp out all day long, in line, so as to get seats when they opened the doors. It was a large church, so we got in each of those first three nights. But that was what I was disgusted about.
I was perturbed about burning money, vacation time, and curiosity, to basically come all the way down there just to see nothing.
Of course, it was great being with those guys, but it’s not like we were hanging out at the beach or anything fun. Just, get up, get in line, sit through a church service, scatter a few meals in there, and then back to the hotel for some sleep before doing it all again the next day.
The “maybe I’d find God again” idea was swiftly evaporating. There was one more day of this left. One more church service to go.
And as I sat overlooking the infield that night, I had resolved that it would be my last.
Assuming I’d return home the same as I was in that moment …
(And assume that, I did.)
… I was prepared to finally just come out and say it plainly to the folks I needed to:
I simply had no belief in God left, nor had I for the last few years or so.
I had sat through three of these services and I sensed nothing special at all. I saw some people falling on the ground when someone prayed for them, but so what? I had seen that before. There was excellent music and fiery preaching, but I’d seen that too. There were crowded altars at the end of each night, packed with people crying and all, but that was just emotionalism. Seen that too.
Feeling actually embarrassed about it, I sat there wondering how in the world did I fall for this? And why did I?
I was so miffed I was on this trip. Completely disgusted.
I recall standing and looking up at the sky. It was packed with more stars than I was used to seeing. I thought something along these lines:
“God, there was a time when I was all about you. But that was clearly a childhood thing. If it wasn’t, I guess tomorrow would be your last time to clue me in on that.”
Meeting God
I had the aisle seat, standing to the right of my buddy Nathan. The rest of our group was aligned down the same row to his left. The praise and worship portion of that night’s service was well underway, probably a half hour to forty-five minutes in already. And of the few thousand people in this sanctuary, I felt like the only guy who just wasn’t involved.
Everyone else looked caught up in it … singing, clapping, swaying, bouncing, hands in the air, joyfully (or so it seemed) engaging with God. I qualify that last part, because I figured it was the work of feelings, spurred on by the anticipation of a wanting crowd after a long day’s waiting. An appetite for something, fed with the incredible talent of a professional Nashville studio musician turned worship leader and the very gifted team of musicians and vocalists surrounding him.
I’ll admit it was hard to miss the uplifting vibe in the house that night. But for me, I figured that’s what good music does to people, and I was already thinking about traveling home.
Waiting to Get In - Brownsville Assembly of God; Pensacola , FL. Photo credit: https://romans1015.com/brownsville-revival/
I remember the sequence of events that followed as a strange mixture of very clear instances among about three hours of blur. So, recounting this in writing will be challenging.
Forgive me for overusing “like” or “as if.” Additionally, there is the fact that many of you will (if you hadn’t thought it of me prior) come away thinking I’m completely nuts.
My biggest concern is … will this bear witness to God, or serve the opposite effect?
(Forgive me, most gracious and heavenly Father if it is not you, but I have an honest sense that full steam ahead is what I should do. If for no other reason than to make sense of how this homecoming ultimately ended up coming about.)
________
I am as sure of God’s presence in those hours, as I am sure of my wife’s presence at our wedding. And for the fact that my natural tendency toward skepticism has already plumbed the depths for any alternative explanation (explanations that your skepticism will soon resort to, so as to dismiss this), I am left with the conviction this encounter was as real as it was divine. Plus, while they did not experience what I did, there are witnesses who watched something significant happen to me that night.
It began during the worship portion of the service. I was growing tired of standing, and they seemed to be getting on a little too long with this one song in particular. I was growing irritated.
So, like a frustrated teen-ager with hands pushed deep in their pockets, I threw my head back and looked up to the ceiling, as if like, “ugh … come on already, man!”
As I did, though, I encountered a sort of reality shift. Like for a few brief moments, I was caught up in the passing of something other worldly.
It’s so impossible to explain, that even trying seems silly. But here goes.
In that instant, I was no longer seeing the world around me. What I was seeing was a small mountain in a vast and gray landscape. And it was from the perspective of looking downward upon it all, as if I was gliding over at helicopter altitude.
Above me (so to my back), I had this sensation of intense light. It was sort of cutting apart the grayness of the overcast sky and the landscape below.
I also heard from behind me what sounded like countless voices. They were singing right along with the choir on the stage.
And POOF!
It was all gone like a fleeting thought.
Yet, in the very next instant, I found myself immersed in formless light. It was perfectly even in intensity. Not the seam of single shadow was observed.
I remember consciously checking if my eyes were open. They were, but I couldn’t see anything because my field of vision was dominated by this radiance.
It was overwhelming.
It was also completely inexplicable.
Both brilliant and blinding … soothing but searing. I couldn’t look at it, but it was impossible to look elsewhere.
It was altogether totally present. There was no corner of my vision where it wasn’t.
There was a literal bodily reaction to it as well. My knees were getting weak. I thought I may fall. I felt breathless.
The “energy” (if it was energy) was like nothing I could explain. I was reacting to it both physically and metaphysically. As in, I wasn’t just feeling it physically, but I was being knit to it at the level of my very self … mind and soul.
This was something occurring in a completely ontological way, in that it made me aware of my total self, as one, in a manner I had never been able to sense before. So, this wasn’t something hitting just my bodily senses, but something connecting with my very essence of being.
And I felt like I was slipping to the power of it … like melting in to it … if that makes sense.
In that, there was something else too.
(And I take pause before using this word)
That "something" was genuinely TERRIFYING.
Not terrifying in the sense it was the least bit angry, or grotesque, or dark, or violent.
Rather, terrifying in how obviously it would not be, could not be, withstood … not in the slightest.
The terror came by way of my acute CERTAINTY that before this light, or energy, or whatever, I was utterly powerless in comparison. Like a blade of grass (cf. Is. 40:7-8).
Paradoxical was the fact that it was simultaneously inviting.
Like terrifyingly good. The sort of goodness you wanted to plunge into. Even though you knew such unadulterated perfection would end you, you were completely OK with that—if not excited for it.
I realized, external to all of this, that I could not hear anything. None of the music or worship around me. None of those countless voices from a second earlier.
From this silence came an odd whisper. Like, not into my ear, but into the depth of my existence … not so much a voice, as it was a sense … at the core of me.
And as if it was blown on the breath of a soft breeze, it asked me, “Are you ready?”
Boom!
I was back in the aisle seat. Back in the church. My buddy Nathan to my left. But now, he was leaning over at me, as I clung to the chair back in front of me, steadying myself.
“Hey man,” he asked, “You OK?”
“Yeah,” I said, “but something is happening.”
I’m not sure exactly what he replied, outside of it being something like, “Cool, let it.”
________
An hour or so later, a few hundred people stood in an arc around the front stage. I wasn’t exactly sure why I was with them. I barely listened to anything between that “moment” and this, as I was still trying to gather it all into something I could make sense of.
What was that?
And what am I supposed to do now?
What am I supposed to do up here?
I only knew, when the time came, I needed to go up there. I felt a deep compulsion at work in that response.
Evangelist. Rev. Steve Hill; Pensacola , FL. Photo credit: https://charismamag.com/propheticrevival/revival/this-humble-act-of-obedience-sparked-brownsville-revival/
I watched the three “premier” revival ministers praying with people, and I observed most of those people fall to the ground as soon as they even got close to one of them.
Watching this, as I had the nights before, I figured most of these people were so eager for “something to happen” that they were falling under their own will, as if trying to prompt God.
There was something very unsavory to me about how so many were pushing through others in an effort to get in the sight lines of one of these “main guys.” Yearning for them to wave a hand in their direction, so they could “fall out,” as though the Holy Spirit would need a hand.
My skepticism in all this created a repellant response in me.
With everyone trying to press inward toward these guys, I was trying to maintain my position at the back. And as more people came forward, I was working to move ever rearward, curiously wanting to stay close enough to qualify as still being “up there.”
Strange, I know.
I knew another thing: I didn’t want any of those guys near me.
I thought, “If God has me up here, then he doesn’t need anyone to lay a finger on me.”
Of course, while entertaining that line of thought … Bam!
I was back in the afore-described radiance. Immediately breathless. Weakness washed over me. My knees grew unstable. I tried to steady myself, but this time there was no seat back to grab hold of.
Out of that same silence, the whisper came, and it said, “kneel.”
It wasn’t a suggestion, I soon realized, as much as it was a declaration. A statement about what was going to happen in the next moment.
Because as sure as I stood there, it felt like someone kicked the backs of my knees forward, and having nothing to catch hold of, I was going down.
NOTE: Now here (as I have clarified in prior times sharing this) is where I have to stress that what follows was not so much a “vision” as it was an experience. It was not merely something I was seeing, but it was something my whole self (each of my senses and my being) was involved in.
I folded to my knees, lurching forward onto my hands. In the blink of an eye the radiance was gone, and drab wet gray was everywhere around me.
I knelt upon uncomfortably hard and rigid terrain. I somehow knew I was atop the mountain I had seen earlier. The sharpness of rock and pebble pinched at my knees and palms.
It was gloomy and over cast. I felt a soft breeze and could smell a slightly metallic dampness in the air. I heard the sound of an intermittent, but constant spattering of heavy liquid.
Something dripped on the stone before me.
I lifted my eyes from their downward gaze to look ahead. A crimson puddle was collecting drops of blood at the base of a large weathered, splintery, squared off grayish-brown wooden trunk. About 8”x 8” by my guess.
Tracing the beam upward, I saw the feet from which the blood was dripping, about four feet above the ground.
Behind the blood the flesh was corpse-ish blue.
Sitting back onto my heels, I lifting my torso erect.
I was kneeling at the foot of The Crucifix.
Like every single one I had ever seen hanging on the walls in my Catholic days, in paintings, sculptures, or what not. Only, this one was nowhere near as tidy. In fact, it was bloated with brutality and gore.
It was heartbreaking to look at, but impossible not to. Especially his face—heavily bruised and caked with blood as it was. With the head angled directly down at me, I noted his eye lids were not fully closed, but the pupils were rolled back.
He was dead.
And aside from me kneeling before him, he was alone.
As the full realization of all this crashed in on me, in the matter of a second or so, I began to well up, and I recall mumbling, “oh no, no, no.”
And I asked … or felt … or thought … “God, why did you bring me here? Why show me?”
The whisper … “So you’d understand this.”
And with that, I felt weight in my hands.
I looked down to see, cupped within them, a gray rock. Or so it seemed at first.
Looking it over, I realized it was not that, but rather a heart.
It was my heart.
I knew it by way of its coldness, hardness, and sharpness of edge.
It was as if every one of these aspects spoke to me about myself and what my long sense of spiritual confusion, loss, and bitterness had amounted to. How it chiseled me and formed me.
Most of all, I was struck by how it was now so withered and lifeless.
I came to know, in that moment, a deep sense of grief and brokenness. It was not grounded in guilt or shame, but in a previously unrecognized sense of abandonment.
“Hold it in the blood,” the whisper urged.
Slowly, I offered it forward, pushing that cold sharp thing into the drops cascading from his feet.
In the instant that first drop connected … RADIANCE!
The same as before. Every corner of my vision. Not to be unseen.
Yet this time there was slight form discernible in the light. Like something pushing from within it.
Again, impossible to describe, but it wasn’t that something was in the light, as much as the light was developing something from itself. So then, the light wasn’t shining on something, as if external to it. The form was taking shape from the light itself. The light was its own entity … its own source.
What was developing from the light was not like a thing approaching me in space, as much as space itself was folding into form.
I became acutely aware that I was not alone.
And as sure as I had that prior sense of breathless, weak in the knees, upon me, I was being hit with it again, only at an intensity I knew was going to utterly consume me.
Again, the presence of terrifying goodness was overcoming me, but this time around it was at an amplitude that was absurdly incomprehensible in power.
The point of reference for measuring that, however, wasn’t how “lowly” or “filthy” I was … only how pure IT was.
Purely pure. Purely un-restrainable. Purely immeasurable. Purely imminent. Purely transcendent.
Holy.
It was as if every atom constituting my physical being was called forth to harken to, and marshal themselves in alignment before, that holiness … to bear reverence as they entered the midst of their God.
And, in that same moment, it was as if every one of those atoms leapt toward its Creator. It was a primal impulse. A gravity that could not be resisted. A desire that could not be assuaged.
Every fiber of my being was called forth to him, and each rapturously gave in.
Unable to stop myself. Not wanting to stop myself. I leapt toward him. Into him.
Like a little kid, how I used to hug at my dad’s side and reach my arms around his waist, I embraced God.
And just like my dad, He placed his arm around my shoulders and drew me in close. The crux of his arm pressed my head to his flank. His hand lovingly brushed the back of it.
I was, however, unable to look up upon his form or face. He was real and tangible and physical, to the sense of touch. But he was pure illumination to the sight.
In essence … unseeable. Yet, breathtaking nonetheless.
Undefinable, unsearchable, incomparable beauty.
Seemed like only a few minutes in, but for the final time, came the whisper ...
“You are loved.”
With every thread of my being, physical, mental, spiritual, whatever, knowing I was … I pulled at him as strongly as I could.
He responded by pulling me tighter.
“Know it,” he said.
With every cell, molecule, and distant corner of my soul, understanding … I did know it. As sure as anything I ever have.
_______
I was still kneeling … leaning forward on my forearms, my temples were pressed hard into my palms. They were soaked with tears. My nose split the gap between the edges of my hands and it was running clear cry-snot onto the industrial, tight loop carpet it was pressed down into.
I was jolted to my senses when I heard the vacuum fire up.
Catching my breath and bearings, I lifted my head to see I was one of only a few folks still up at the front of the sanctuary. I was about forty feet from the first step of the altar/stage. Same place toward the rear that I positioned myself.
I saw a guy laying flat on his back, laughing warmly, as if he was with someone in another place. Unlike a while prior, I wasn’t skeptical of this now.
The few hundred folks, the “main guys” praying, the worship team, and the rest of the attendees I was among a few minutes ago, however, were gone.
The house lights were on. The crew were straightening chairs. Stagehands were resetting the platform. And a custodian was running the Hoover upright over to the side.
I stood. Still a bit unsteady, I took a few deep breaths to balance out the lingering dizziness.
I realized the service was over. Like apparently long over.
I accepted I was “out of it.” But surely it was only seven or eight minutes, or so.
What was going on? How’d this place clear out that quick?
I turned to look around, and in the back row of seating, my buddies were huddled around talking, laughing, waiting. When I got over to them, they were curious about what had happened to me.
But my first question was something along the lines of, “Where is everyone?”
“Gone. Service is over, man.”
“How long was I up there?”
“Hour. Hour twenty, or so.”
I began to weep again. There was no way.
But by all accounts I had just spent an hour with God.
“Can’t wait to hear about this,” one of them said, “when we're eating something.”
They will affirm how I sobbed all the way through our late-night trip to Pizza Hut. I doubt I stopped until I fell asleep that night.
It wasn’t out of pain or remorse, but rather out of both the need for a physical release to such an experience, and also because of the assurance of God as reality … an assurance that vanquishing all that confusion, bitterness, loss, and sense of His abandonment.
The next day, traveling home, I was so eager to return to MY church family. Suddenly, I saw that community wholly different than ever before.
This revival was at Brownsville Assembly of God. That church was an Assembly of God.
So …
God must be AG!
Of course, I never thought that any more than in jest. But no matter, there was a natural connection to this all and the idea that it was the right venue for me to continue growing in this life altering revelation of our Heavenly Father.
So, after returning, I planted my spiritual flag there. And the next decade was amazing. Turns out, it was the right place indeed. For the season that followed, at least.
________
This seems like a natural place to pause. Thank you for your endurance, if you've read up to this point.
Until the next installment, blessings to all who made it this far.
-JZ
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